Richard Zouche's the Dove

A Periegetical Poem from Jacobean New College: Richard Zouche’s The Dove (1613) In 1613 there appeared in duodecimo a long, unusual poem called The Dove, or Passages of Cosmography, by Richard Zouche, who identified himself on the title-page of the work as a ‘Ciuilian, of New Colledge in OXFORD’. Now a ‘Civilian’ is a student of Roman law (‘civil’, as opposed to the English ‘common’ law), and Zouche was to become one of the most famous civil lawyers of the seventeenth century, the man more responsible than any in contemporary England for codifying civil law into textbooks, and for championing its relevance in an age displaying considerable metropolitan bias against the bookish law of the universities. The Dove, however, is a poem unblemished by its author’s legal trajectory, and is rather a homage to its Greek literary model, the Oikoumenes periegesis or ‘Description of the World’ by Dionysius Periegetes, a poet who had lived most probably at Alexandria in the time of the emperor Hadrian, in the early second century AD. Zouche, when he published his Dove fifteen centuries later, was in his mid-twenties, having arrived in the college in 1607. The normal route through the academe was to take the bachelor of arts degree, four years after matriculation, and then the master of arts three years after that. Those set on law, however, pursued a parallel degree structure, that of the bachelor and doctor of civil law (‘BCL’ and ‘DCL’), and accordingly Zouche took his BCL in 1614 and his DCL three years later. This poem is therefore the work of an undergraduate, and Zouche dedicated this, his first book to his in-law Edward, Baron Zouche, soon to be appointed Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. It was commercially available: the imprint says that it was published ‘for George Norton’, a bookseller who traded near the ‘Temple-barre’ in London. But it survives in such low numbers that I suspect it was a limited edition, and at least partially assisted by the Zouche family.1 As was the fashion, Zouche solicited short poems from his friends to adorn his first solo publication. Such ‘liminary’ verse is always useful for reconstructing friendship groups, and Zouche obtained five such poems, from Thomas Lake, John Harris, Richard Yong, Nicholas Stoughton, and Charles Herbert. Most of these men were New College fellows, and most were connected with the law. Lake had matriculated in 1610, and was the son of Sir Thomas Lake, royal secretary. His uncle was Arthur Lake, the warden of the college. He actually took a BA from nearby Hart Hall in this year, but had already embarked on a legal career, having enrolled as a student of the Middle Temple in 1609. John Harris was a little older, having taken his MA in 1612, and he too was destined for great things, as the future regius professor of Greek, warden of Winchester College, and the biographer of Warden Lake himself. Stoughton was another well- to-do young lawyer, matriculating in the same year as Thomas Lake, and joining the Inner Temple in 1613; both he and Lake served several times as MPs in their maturity. Charles Herbert, who had arrived in the college in 1611, was one of the prominent aristocratic literary family of that name; his famous brothers were George the poet and Edward the philosopher. As Edward Herbert recalled in his extraordinary autobiography: ‘My brother Charles was Fellow of New College, in Oxford, where he died young, after he had given great hopes of himself every way’. 2 Finally, Richard Yong was in one respect the odd one out, as he was a student at Gloucester Hall (refounded in 1714 as Worcester College), having matriculated there in 1610, aged sixteen; he was probably the man of this name who later joined the Inner Temple. Yong also wrote the longest poem, ‘to my dearly affectionate friend’, and, following the language of 1 The Short Title Catalogue identifies the printer as Thomas Snodham. ESTC today recognises only seven copies, and it has always been rare: the Bodleian copy bears a note from 1816 remarking upon a copy offered for the extraordinary sum of fourteen guineas. The poem has been edited with a memoir of Zouche by one of his descendants, Richard Walker of Magdalen College (Oxford, 1839). 2 The Life of Lord Herbert of Cherbury (London, 1887), p. 27l. 1 New College Notes 10 (2018), no. 5 ISSN 2517-6935 Richard Zouche’s The Dove Zouche’s own poem, he—as only Stoughton otherwise did—wrote in English, a point to which I shall return. Zouche’s poem consists of slightly fewer than 150 stanzas of verse, in the popular stanzaic form ABABCC, known as the ‘Venus and Adonis stanza’ after its use by Shakespeare for his poem of that name. It is an unusual choice given the subject matter, for classical poetry on such subjects was usually written in hexameter verse, and modern poets writing vernacular technical or didactic poems tended to adopt rhyming couplets as a kind of modern equivalent. A good example of this form, highly praised by Zouche, is Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas, the sixteenth-century Gascon Huguenot courtier and poet, whose hugely popular poem on the Creation, La Semaine, had been translated into English verse by Josuah Sylvester as the Devine Weekes and Workes (published from 1605). This was a popular work in New College, cleverly alluded to, for instance, in a play that was probably written and performed by the students of the college at around this time, a vernacular adaptation of Plautus’s Captivi with an added romance subplot featuring an old man who makes a hash of a section of the Devine Weekes on what a champion he still is.3 Zouche sequenced his poem as an invocation (‘The Doue’), two preambles (‘The World’, ‘The Earth’), and then three mini-cantos on ‘Asia’, ‘Afrique’, and ‘Europe’ respectively, collectively indeed a ‘Cosmography’ in the contemporary understanding of that term. This is a clear genuflection to his literary model, Dionysius Periegetes, who had structured his poem comparably, and a few words about the reputation of the Oikoumenes periegesis in the period are in order. Dionysius Periegetes (‘Dionysius the Periegete’), often encountered as ‘Dionysius Afer’ (‘the African’) in the early modern period, furnished the renaissance classroom with an ideal text for instruction in the geography needed to read the classics.4 Before (and indeed well after) the editio princeps in Greek appeared in 1512, the text was most commonly encountered in one of its various Latin translations, of which there were at least ten in circulation. New College, for instance, holds a copy of the translation of the sixth-century grammarian Priscian, appended to a 1481 Venetian edition of his works; otherwise the translation probably most frequently encountered is that of the fourth-century writer Rufus Festus Avienus.5 It was the Greek original , however, that was read very widely in sixteenth-century schools and colleges, and some sense of how the poem was approached is provided by another edition held by New College, that of Antwerp, 1553. This was a handy parallel edition, prepared by Marcus Hopper, and presenting a quartet of texts by (pseudo-)Proclus,6 Cleomedes, Aratus, and finally Dionysius ‘Afer’.7 Now the first three of these texts were introductory works to astronomy, the first two being semi-technical accounts in prose, and the third the evergreen versification on the constellations and weather signs by the Hellenistic poet Aratus. Astronomy and geography were paired in the western intellectual tradition, and what Aratus had done for the constellations in the heavens, so Dionysius, some centuries later, did for the places on the Earth. They are frequently encountered paired in curricular lists in the early modern period—the 3 I have edited the surviving fragments of this play in Malone Society Collections XVI (2011). 4 See the article on Dionysius for the Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum series (1960- ) by George B. Parks and F. Edward Cranz (it is in vol. 3), with the Addenda by Dider Marcotte (vol. 10). For the poem itself I refer to Jane Lightfoot’s elegant edition (Oxford, 2014). 5 BT1.1.13, containing sixteenth/seventeenth-century marginal annotations in a variety of different hands throughout. This is the only copy of this edition in Oxford. 6 This ubiquitous text on the sphere is actually an excerpt from the Hellenistic astronomical writer Geminus’s Eisagoge, which itself was only published in 1590 in Altdorf, ultimately from copies of the text supplied by Henry Savile, today among the Savilian MSS in the Bodleian. 7 BT3.179.6, one of only two copies of this edition in Oxford. The text, no edition recoverable, appears in at least two Oxford booklists of this century: see Private Libraries in Renaissance England (<https://plre.folger.edu/>), 67.75, 67.191:1 (booklist of 1558) and 122.7:2 (booklist of 1577). 2 New College Notes 10 (2018), no. 5 ISSN 2517-6935 Richard Zouche’s The Dove poet John Milton, for instance, who ran a private academy in London in the 1640s, read both texts with his students, and their twin influence on his later epic poem Paradise Lost is easily felt. Dionysius had found an English translator in 1572, when Thomas Twyne, fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford—one of several scholarly Twynes—published his The Surveye of the World, or Situation of the Earth, so muche as is inhabited. (His son Brian, antiquary and first keeper of Oxford University’s archives, was a friend and colleague of Zouche, and bequeathed his father’s translation to Corpus.) This is a very rare book now, and was aimed, so the translator claimed, not just at ‘students of Geographie’ but also, rather improbably, at actual ‘Saylers’.

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